Remote management of equipment in a communications network is quite desirable. It allows for a centralized management of the equipment without having to deploy people and devices to the location of the equipment. Furthermore, it may provide a common interface to manage the equipment versus each type of equipment having a vendor specific interface. Thus remote management can save the network operator time and money.
One way that remote management can be achieved is with a Terminal emulation program (Telnet). Telnet provides access to the equipment and allows commands to manage the equipment to be entered via a command line interface (CLI). However, there are drawbacks to Telnet. One drawback is that Telnet is typically disabled on the Wide Area Network (WAN) side, which results in the lack of accessibility from the WAN for remote management. There are several problems even if Telnet is enabled on the WAN side. One such problem is that Telnet does not have a robust security mechanism which makes is susceptible to security breaches. Another problem is that the Internet Protocol (IP) address for equipment in a LAN network is usually dynamically assigned via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Thus, the IP address of the equipment may change in contrast to having a static IP address that does not change. When the IP address is dynamically assigned, the WAN side may not have knowledge of the IP address to be able to access the equipment. Yet another drawback of Telnet is that commands are vendor specific thus a common interface is not achieved.
Another way to achieve remote management is by Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP provides remote management by transferring messages, called protocol data units (PDUs), between the equipment and a management system. Although SNMP attempts to address the common interface issue it still has many of the same problem of Telnet, such as typically being disabled on the WAN side and problems of dealing with a dynamic IP address.
Yet another way to achieve remote management is by a protocol to manage Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) from a management device in the WAN, which has been provided by the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Forum. This protocol, the CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP), is defined in the Technical Report 069 (TR-069). CWMP provides remote management from a configuration device, such as an Auto-Configuration Server (ACS), which communicates with the CPE using the CWMP. In addition to a robust security mechanism, CWMP addresses the problems of dynamic IP addressing. Furthermore, CWMP provides the following primary capabilities in managing the CPE:
auto-configuration and dynamic service provisioning,
software/firmware image management,
status and performance monitoring, and
diagnostics
Although CWMP addresses the drawbacks of other schemes, a shortcoming to CWMP is that this does not address the millions of CWMP noncompliant equipment. Therefore, there exists a need to provide an improved remote management to allow management of CWMP noncompliant equipment via CWMP.